Those to whom god has given understanding and eloquence must not be silent or hide their gift, but must return the gift so that it flowers under the admiration of others.
Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.
What women can do when given a task! Their abilities seem limitless.
And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.
Dislike pours out of her toward both Marie and the abbess, a spiritual wind. She has a strong-weak walk like a heartbeat, because a horse stepped on her foot when she was a growing girl and crushed the bones and nerves there. I saw the foot when she came to the abbey oh many decades ago and I had to wash it, it is a mangled horror, the abbess says, it is the stuff of nightmares. Hurts to this day like the flames of hell, Wevua says with satisfaction.
How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life.
She straps on her sword, holds her heavy abbess’s staff in her left hand. She rides out.
Before the girl begins to wail and Marie crosses the room to plunge the burnt hand into the washing water, Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.
And later, as the bells for Matins sounded in the dark and she walked back in the darkness as though blind, she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to god – not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil – but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.
The subprioress wraths herself outside to collect the eggs.
Marie thinks, truly, she does not believe she could live her in this bitter, sloven place without at least the consolation of bacon.
It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer.
The daily kills her greatness.
Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.
Of course Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness.
And now that she is old and dying in the close herbed air of the infirmary, she thinks of how strange it is that it is not the long good comfortable times of happiness returning so close to the end, but rather the times of briefest ecstasy, and of darkness, of struggle and passion and hunger and misery.
Nothing can drive out the disease: not praying, not bathing them in holy water, not tying them to their beds, not leaping out from the night to frighten them, not holding them by the ankle in the cold river, not beating them around the head with a yew branch, not burying them crown to toe in warm manure, not hanging them upside down from a high tree and spinning them until they vomit, not drilling a tiny hole through their skulls to let the bad humors out of the brains.
Marie sees again the Ladies’ Army pouring down a hillside in the Byzantine Empire, riding astride unwomanly, shouting, swords drawn, their hair loosed and flying behind them, all in the white and red tunics, ululating, fearsome.
And the works and the hours go on.
But the book is not speaking to her today, Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim, it is speaking to some other woman with no hope in her heart.